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Experiments with Bible Study by Hans-Ruedi Weber (World Council of Churches, 1981) is a book which after nearly 20 years I still find rich in ideas. In the introduction he retells a brief story from East Africa: A woman who always took with her as she walked a bulky Bible was mocked by the villagers: 'Why, when there are so many books to read, always the Bible?'; her answer, 'Yes, of course there are many books which I could read. But there is only one book which reads me!'. That claim would sum up the experience of many Christians as they study the Bible: we find there a hall of mirrors offering a myriad of new perspectives on ourselves - perspectives, we suspect, that are not distortions but truer reflections of ourselves than those we usually see. This is also surely our goal as preachers: to enable a familiar passage, or one that at first seems strange and perhaps uninspiring, not only to speak to the congregation but to 'read' them, so they go away challenged and changed by the encounter.
But as members of a congregation that often is not our experience: we listen to a preacher reading a passage from the Bible and telling us what it is saying, using it as the basis for a sermon, and we feel that she or he knew already what they wanted to say before they turned to the Bible; they had a message or sermon in mind, and 'found' that the Bible passage fitted it - or rather made the passage fit it. The Bible did not 'read' them, it did not take the leading role; they read it and saw in it what they already knew. And perhaps most of us suspect that if it is so obvious to us when other people do this, perhaps at least sometimes other people see us doing the same when we least suspect it.
Our other experiences confirm this: we can hardly ignore the varieties of interpretations of the Bible that there are, and hopefully we have learnt some tolerance of those we do not share. In areas of disagreement and conflict, within the church or among Christians, for example over issues such as sexuality, it is not that one side rejects the Bible while the other faithfully acknowledges its authority - although when feelings run high this is often claimed by one side or the other. But in fact all sides are seeking to listen to the Biblical witness and are struggling to allow it to speak within our own time and context. Our understandings of the past, of the force of the original context, of how God speaks, and of our own or others' experience of being human and of God - all these we bring to our reading of the Bible, and so we hear it, and try to let it read' us in different ways. Yet as the things we bring are different, so too are our readings' - the way we hear it, and the way we think it 'hears' us and our concerns.
Or we might think of our experience of literature, music or art. Not long ago I went to a performance of Shakespeare's Richard III: we enjoyed the production and talked about the way Richard was portrayed, very differently from other productions on stage or film. It was the same play, the same script, but a totally different reading of the character: we might have our preferences and criticisms, but could never say that only one interpretation was 'right'. We may think of a piece of music or of art as 'inspired' and still recognise that there can be many different interpretations of it: you may let a painting 'read' you, you may find yourself seeing there truths or possibilities which I would never think to see. We know that we bring our own agenda, our own knowledge, our own past experiences, our own present hopes and fears, even, perhaps especially, when we feel we are letting the painting, the music, the literature, and even the Bible challenge us.
Indeed, some would say within a contemporary understanding of what we are doing, that each of us is involved in 'producing' the painting, the music, the text - without our response, shaped by everything we bring with us as we respond, they would be splodges of chemically produced colour on a canvas, random squiggles we call notes on a set of parallel lines, shapes we call letters on a page. In that sense each of us 'produces' our own painting, music, text out of the encounter.
If we continue for long along this route we may begin to lose confidence. Perhaps the painting as I see it is different from that which you or anyone else sees, and no more true, or false, to the original. Perhaps all the time we are reading into the text our own wishes, our own prejudices. Perhaps we never let it read us, but fool ourselves into thinking that that is what we are doing, even when we are at our most prayerful. So what are we to do?
One solution is to accept this and play along with it: 'This morning I want to share with you a few thoughts that I had while thinking about this passage'. One might almost add, 'Take them or leave them - if you do not like them chose some more to your taste; I will not judge you if you do not judge me'. But is this what preaching is about? Is this how we are to respond to our calling to be ministers of God's word? Is this the proclamation of the Gospel? The author of Hebrews would disagree as he described the word of God as sharper than any two edged sword (Hebs. 4.12); so too would Paul as he laboured under the compulsion to preach the Gospel whatever personal distress it might bring (1 Car. 2. 1-7; 9.16). When we find the 'meaning' of the Bible most comfortable, most in line with our own feelings, we have most reason for concern!
This is why we endeavour as far as possible to set the Biblical passages within their original context; to discover when they were written and in what circumstances, what the ideas and images would have meant at that time. To go back to my earlier examples, we know that a later reader of a play, musician, student of art may see in the piece something the author, composer, artist never consciously intended, and usually we do not then reject the interpretation as illegitimate: its untapped potential is part of what makes a work 'inspired'. Yet we are probably more uncomfortable with an interpretation which the original author could never have intended, and even would have rejected. We preserve the 'otherness' of the painting, of the text, by letting, as far as we are able, what it could have meant in its original context control our tendency to read ourselves and our own wishes into it.
And we do it in company with others. If no-one else can hear what we hear in the music, we should wonder whether it is really that music we are listening to. We discover how others have read the text through what has been written in the past, in commentaries, in Bible Studies and Notes, in a whole range of books; and through the study of the Bible we share with others, we test our own insights by their insights. This does not mean that we have to go back to thinking there can only be one way of interpreting a passage, nor that we can only repeat what someone else has said before. But we are called into the community of God's people, and it is through the faithful and prayerful experience of that community that the Bible has been found to offer to us the Word of God.
Perhaps too, we recognise the variety of 'voices' within the Bible. The different, even contradictory, messages are not a cause of concern, to be plastered over in a false harmony. They represent different experiences of and responses to God in different times, places, and circumstances. If 'The Bible says "X"', it probably also 'says "Y"'; and if we find "X" congenial, perhaps we need to listen to "Y". There are, too, many examples of how, in places where the Bible has long been read as supporting 'the establishment' and tradition, it has suddenly been rediscovered as deeply subversive, encouraging protest and the search for justice and freedom, perhaps as different parts are read and studied, or read and studied by different people in their setting. The Bible is, as has come to be recognised, deeply patriarchal; but it also contains the seeds which can flourish into new forms of equality. Again, are we ready to be subverted as we read the Bible?
Finally, neither the 'word of God' nor 'the Gospel' in the passages from Hebrews and Paul cited above, are simply to be identified with the Bible. Writing to the Churches of Galatia Paul struggled to deal with other preachers whose interpretation differed from his own. Yet 'the bottom line' was clear: there could be no place for any so-called 'Gospel', any preaching, which went contrary to or undermined the Gospel of God's act of grace in Christ Jesus; here it was not a case of' 'Let me interpret in my way, and them in theirs', but 'let that one be accursed' (Gal. 1.9 NRSV). Paul did not come to such a judgement lightly, and he did acknowledge a range of flexibility in both his own and the wider church's preaching (1 Car. 9.19-23; Gal. 2.7-8). Yet all our reading of the Bible is done in the light of the Gospel: only so can we allow it to read us. As we celebrate LPMA's 150th anniversary we rejoice in the fellowship in preaching we share with all who have gone before us, and we commit ourselves to hearing anew God's word for the future.